Sounds stress and intonation in the English language

This Powerpoint showcases a brief outline on these aspects of the English language which includes a crisp introduction to the sounds, stress and intonation.

1. WELCOME S. Mohan Raj Ph.D Research Scholar VIT, Vellore. 9751660760 [email protected] Introduction to sounds , stress and intonation

2. Speech sounds are also called as phonemes . Vibrations that travel through the air or another medium can be heard when they reach a person’s or animal’s ear. The Sound produced by continuous and regular vibrations , as opposed to noise . 2 Sound and Noise Sound  (= phone ) is a vibration or wave caused by an object. This definition underlines acoustics and physical characteristics of sounds of speech. Sounds are instances of phonemes in real speech. Put it simply, sounds are everything we hear with our ears.

3. Phonemes (speech sounds) are represented in writing by placing the letter(s) used to represent the sound between slashes — so, for example the sound that you say at the beginning of the word pot is represented by /p/. 3 A Phoneme  (Gr.  phone  ”Sound, voice”) is the smallest contrastive unit of language. Sound - Phoneme A phoneme is the smallest part of spoken language that makes a difference in meaning. Sounds of English The English alphabet has 26 letters that are used individually in various combinations to represent 44 different speech sounds .

4. 4  The English alphabet (26 letters), made up of  consonants  and  vowels .   There are five   vowels ( a,e,i,o,u )  and the rest are all  consonants. In English, the pronunciation of words centres upon  syllables. A syllable  is a unit of pronunciation which has one vowel sound , with or without surrounding consonants, forming a word. Ex. 2 syllables in wa / ter and 3 in in/ fer /no. The sounds of spoken language are known as  phonemes . Thus, /water/ has 2 syllables but 4 phonemes: w/a/t/ er /inferno/ has 3 syllables but 7 phonemes: i/n/f/e/r/n/o.  The written equivalent of sounds or phonemes are known as  graphemes,  and the English alphabet made up of the 26 letters is called the  orthographic alphabet.   The English Alphabet

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6. 6 In order to study the sounds of English, linguists devised an alphabet which contains symbols to capture all possible sounds in English, called the  International Phonetic Alphabet .

7. 7 The standard form of spoken English or the reference accent for English is known as  Received Pronunciation (RP). The  International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)  is an alphabet of phonetic notation designed to capture all the different ways words in English can be pronounced, based on the Latin alphabet. It was designed by the International Phonetic Association (1999) as a standardised system for representing sounds of oral language.

8. 8 English Alphabets with Phonetic pronunciation

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10. 10 Organs of Speech

11. 11 Speech Mechanism

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15. 15 Word Stress Pattern in English Words Word stress and syllables are the next important things to learn about which is related to English pronunciation and accent. Word Stress is also sometimes referred to as Word Accent . Syllables A syllable is a word, or part of a word, which contains a single vowel sound. It is a single unit of speech. Each word contains one syllable or more. The syllable which is pronounced with greater force is called the stressed syllable . One Syllable Words with a single syllable: pen, man, pig, cup, hat . In English, a vowel sound can be made of more than one vowel letter. The following words have a single syllable: feet, moon, cake, have, break, bought All of these words contain only one vowel sound, and therefore a single syllable.

16. 16 Two Syllables A word can have more than one syllable. garden: gar-den , hotel: ho- tel , consist: con- sist , object: ob- ject , focus: fo-cus Three Syllables Examples of words with three syllables. September: sep-tem- ber , department: de-part- ment telephone: te -le-phone , camera: ca- mer -a, Saturday: sa - tur -day, hamburger : ham-bur- ger , vitamin: vi- ta -min Four Syllables Examples of words with four syllables. kindergarten: kin- der -gar-ten information: in-for-ma- tion , January: ja -nu- ar -y, American: A- mer -i-can, discovery: di - sco - ver -y

17. 17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX1rrFh4OZw Read for Rules of Word Stress in English at: https://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/word-stress-2.htm Few things to remember: A word can only have one stress. In a very long word you can have secondary stress but it is always much smaller stress. Only vowels are stressed, not consonants. The vowels in English are a, e, i, o, and u. The consonants are all the other letters.

18. 18 Stress is a suprasegmentals feature Rhythm & intonation Rhythm ( suprasegmental stress patterns) (time) a. The relationship between stressed and unstressed syllables b. Patterns of a combination of stressed and unstressed syllables c. The liaison or other phonological structures (assimilation, deletion, etc.) Intonation ( suprasegmental melody) (time + space) a. Pitch contours; break indexes (time) b. The intonation units; the pitch accent (time + space) All languages have their distinct melody or music. This music of language is called intonation . Falling and Rising are the two intonation patterns. Three main patterns of intonation are: Falling Rising and Fall-rise .

19. 19 Traditional intonation frameworks

20. 20 (Celce Mercia, et. al., 1996. Teaching Pronunciation)

21. 21 Strong and Weak forms Weak forms are syllable sounds that become unstressed in connected speech, it is often pronounced as a Schwa . Strong and weak syllables are described in terms of stress. Strong syllables are stressed and weak syllables are unstressed . a /ə/ I’ve got a new dress. am / əm / /m/ I’m not going home, am I? an /ən/ That’s an apple and / ənd / / ən / We need some salt and pepper. any / ənɪ / Do you have any money? are /ə/ They are at school just now. as / əz / It was as big as an elephant. at / ət / She works at night. be / bɪ / /bi/ He’s going to be late. been / bɪn / Have you been here long? but / bət / The food is good but the service is terrible.

22. 22 Voice Modulation It is a change in stress, pitch, loneliness, or tone of the voice and inflexion of the voice. Components of Voice Modulation Pace or Speech speed Pitch or depth of voice Pause Power Volume Emphasis Inflexion – ups and downs

23. 23 https://blogonlinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/phoneme-sound-allophone-phone/ https://www.readingrockets.org/teaching/reading101-course/modules/sounds-speech/sounds-speech-depth https://www.dvusd.org/cms/lib/AZ01901092/Centricity/Domain/3795/Sound_Spelling_Chart.pdf https://www2.aston.ac.uk/lss/research/lss-research/ccisc/discourse-and-culture/west-midlands-english-speech-and-society/sounds-of-english https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX1rrFh4OZw https://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/word-stress-2.htm Reference

24. 24 Thank you